3. Determine Your Goals | |
| This step is very important and yet often rushed through or skipped over to get to the look and feel. The beautiful graphics and layout come much later in the process. Now we need to figure out what do we need the website to do for us? Informational Website Are we basically looking for a website to display some information about our company along with some pictures? Maybe throw in our address, telephone number and email address and we are happy? If that’s the case this is one of the simplest websites to have built and your cost should be at the low end of the spectrum. These types of websites are good for individuals or small organizations that essentially need to make sure customers can search and find them on the web. Advertising Website Perhaps we need to take the reach of our website a bit further. There are several popular options for enhancing advertising and we will run through a few here. Image sliders are very popular and provide a way for you to show multiple images using attractive effects as they transition. The images can highlight products, services or encourage people to take an action. The multi-media is more captivating than just plain text and will result in more visitors engaging with your website. Another alternative would be to include an image gallery. A basic gallery is built to show dozens of images and should provide an easy tool for captioning the photos. On the more complex side galleries can be used to show products and then integrate with an eCommerce enabled (shopping cart & payment processor) website for customers to purchase. Online Forms Perhaps we are a little more tech savvy than just looking for phone calls and would like to collect some information and have customers contact us through our website? This is where forms come in. Good forms should be built to collect the exact information you need, no extra information (no one likes filling out surveys) and should deliver this information to you in an email or database. eCommerce Websites While these are the most efficient types of websites for increasing sales and cutting costs they are also the most complex and costly to build. If you need to sell products online, sell tickets to events or sell memberships with protected members-only content you’ll need an eCommerce website. There are many options out there for implementing these types of sites. Our personal favorite is a mix of a couple of integration plugins in WordPress coupled with PayPal secure payment gateway. It’s important to note PayPal has been around the longest. PayPal originally required everyone to become a member but now allows people to use any credit card without having to join. PayPal also has an excellent performance record. You can actually use our online store to pick and choose these various options and get an immediate price for these various types of websites. Feel free to add and remove services to your cart to price out any kind of mix you can imagine. We allso encourage you to go ahead and do a Google search for “how much does a website cost” and use a couple of the dozens of calculators to compare with. | |
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